Tag Archives: bipolar disorder

Is the American Psychiatric Association in Bed with Big Pharma? Answer: Yes

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) is published by the American Psychiatric Association. The DSM provides a common language and standard criteria for the classification of mental disorders, which is used in the United States and to some extent internationally, by clinicians, researchers, psychiatric drug regulation agencies, health insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies, and policy makers. The DSM is produced by a panel of psychiatrists, many of whom have financial ties to the pharmaceutical industry. It is considered the “bible” of American psychiatry. The latest edition — DSM-IV — was published in 1994.

In 1952, the DSM was a small, spiral-bound handbook (DSM-I), but the latest edition (DSM-IV), is a 943-page magnum opus. Over time, psychiatric diagnoses have increased in the American population and in turn, drugs that affect mental states are then used to treat them. The theory that psychiatric conditions are caused by a biochemical imbalance is often used as a justification for their widespread use, even though the theory in unproven. Since there are no objective tests for mental illness and what is normal and abnormal is often unclear, psychiatry is a particularly fertile field for creating new diagnoses or broadening old ones.

FDA Needs to Ban Antipsychotic Drug Use on Kids

While the FDA and its Pediatric advisory panel sit around pondering if one antipsychotic drug is more likely to cause diabetes in children than another while continuing their stall tactic of “let’s study it some more ” routine, we’d like to point out the simple solution: Considering that antipsychotic drugs are already documented by international drug regulatory agencies to cause not only diabetes but obesity, psychosis, blood clots, heart problems, cardiac events, seizures, toxicity, confusion, coma and stroke (and that’s just in kids) as well as brain atrophy (meaning they actually shrink brains); considering there is no medical test to prove any child has a brain malfunction, chemical imbalance or any physical condition requiring the administration of these lethal drugs—and considering these drugs are literally killing kids that have nothing medically wrong with them in the first place— Do the job you are paid by U.S. taxpayers to do and BAN their use on children. Period.

Are Psychiatric Medications Making Us Sicker?

I first took a close look at treatments for mental illness 15 years ago while researching an article for Scientific American. At the time, sales of a new class of antidepressants, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, or SSRI’s, were booming. The first SSRI, Prozac, had quickly become the most widely prescribed drug in the world. Many psychiatrists, notably Peter D. Kramer, author of the best seller Listening to Prozac, touted SSRI’s as a revolutionary advance in the treatment of mental illness. Prozac, Kramer said in a phrase that I hope now haunts him, could make patients “better than well.”

Clinical trials told a different story. SSRI’s are no more effective than two older classes of antidepressants, tricyclics and monoamine oxidase inhibitors. What was even more surprising to me—given the rave reviews Prozac had received from Kramer and others—was that antidepressants as a whole were not more effective than so-called talking cures, whether cognitive behavioral therapy or even old-fashioned Freudian psychoanalysis. According to some investigators, treatments for depression and other common ailments work—if they do work—by harnessing the placebo effect, the tendency of a patient’s expectation of improvement to become self-fulfilling. I titled my article “Why Freud Isn’t Dead.” Far from defending psychoanalysis, my point was that psychiatry has made disturbingly little progress since the heyday of Freudian theory.

Psychiatric disease labeling of children exposed as scam by non-profit group

Child drugging has been a huge profitable market for Big Pharma, earning them $4.8 billion dollars a year. They have done everything in their power to convince the press, legislators and especially parents why children need to be put on drugs. They claim that ADD/ADHD, depression, bipolar disorder, etc., are medical conditions, and consider them on par with cancer, diabetes, and heart disease. But in reality there is no actual evidence that proves that psychiatric disorders are indeed medical conditions. They simply diagnose a child by using a behavioral checklist.

There are 20 million children in the United States who have been diagnosed with some kind of psychiatric disorder and drugged for it. It’s practically an epidemic. Innocent children are being turned into patients for simply acting like kids.

Psychiatric disease labeling of children exposed as scam by non-profit group

Child drugging has been a huge profitable market for Big Pharma, earning them $4.8 billion dollars a year. They have done everything in their power to convince the press, legislators and especially parents why children need to be put on drugs. They claim that ADD/ADHD, depression, bipolar disorder, etc., are medical conditions, and consider them on par with cancer, diabetes, and heart disease. But in reality there is no actual evidence that proves that psychiatric disorders are indeed medical conditions. They simply diagnose a child by using a behavioral checklist.

There are 20 million children in the United States who have been diagnosed with some kind of psychiatric disorder and drugged for it. It’s practically an epidemic. Innocent children are being turned into patients for simply acting like kids.